The Guatemalan Military:
What the U.S. Files
Reveal

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Introduction

In July 1994, the Guatemalan government and the URNG
signed the Human Rights Accord establishing the Historical Clarification
Commission. That same month, the National Security Archive began
work on a Guatemala Documentation Project, an effort to obtain the release
of secret U.S. files on Guatemala.

The project's first objective was to support the
human rights investigations of the Clarification Commission. We believed
that the commission would benefit from access to declassified U.S. documents,
since the United States had maintained close relations with every Guatemalan
government since the overthrow
of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 (with the exception of the Lucas García
regime). Such contact implied the existence of a treasure trove of
records that could shed light on a range of critical issues, including
U.S. policy in Guatemala; relations between the two countries; social,
political and economic developments; the origins of the civil conflict;
and details on specific human rights cases. We also knew there was
one issue about which the truth commission would have virtually no primary
information but which is well documented by U.S. agencies: the Guatemalan
intelligence and security apparatus. As it turned out, of course,
the military was the central focus of the commission's study.

The Archive already had experience working with truth
commissions in Central America. In 1992 and 1993, the Archive provided
documents and some technical assistance to the United Nations Truth Commission
in El Salvador and saw the immense trouble its staff had in obtaining even
the most basic data about the Salvadoran armed forces -- information the
commission needed in order to understand the institutional causes behind
the human rights violations it was charged with investigating. Dr.
Leo Valladares, the Honduran human rights ombudsman with whom the Archive
has collaborated extensively since 1993, had an equally difficult time
compiling fundamental information about Honduran army intelligence units
behind many of the disappearances of the early 1980s. In view of
the Guatemalan military's traditional secrecy and opacity, it was evident
that a Guatemalan truth commission would have no more luck than Valladares
or the commission in El Salvador in locating information on the armed forces.

A second objective of the Guatemala Documentation
Project was to address directly a restriction placed on the Clarification
Commission by its mandate: that is, the prohibition against naming
names. As the establishing document stated, "The work, recommendations
and report of the Commission will not individualize responsibilities..."
The Archive respected the decision of the peace negotiators to limit the
scope of the commission's investigations, and recognized that there were
legitimate misgivings about permitting a human rights commission  which
had no legal or judicial powers  from accusing individuals by name of
specific crimes. What seemed unacceptable, however, was the perpetuation
of a protective wall of silence around the army as an institution.
This was the concern that prompted us to create the database. Our
objectives were distinct from the goals of human rights advocates.
A human rights organization deals with the issue of naming names by starting
with the abuses and abusers. The Archive approached the issue by
starting with an analysis of the institution.

The dilemma posed by the military's culture of secrecy
goes beyond impeding accountability, of course. Without basic information
on the architecture of the armed forces, the CEH would have had difficulty
identifying potential military sources for testimony or firsthand accounts
of the violence. And without reliable data on the professional careers
of army officers, it would have been impossible to confirm the information
those sources did provide. Even more broadly, it would be futile
for a truth commission or for the Guatemalan public to attempt to comprehend
four decades of violence without a detailed understanding of what everyone
acknowledges has been Guatemala's most powerful institution. Accordingly, the Archive
decided to compile a database on the most important military units and
officers. Our initial intention was to provide the Clarification
Commission with an encyclopedic guide on the command structure and organization
of the armed forces as an aid for their investigations  the kind of reference
tool we take for granted in the United States but which simply does not
exist in Guatemala. Subsequent to the release of the CEH report,
we refined the database in preparation for its public release today.

Finally, we felt it was critical to clarify U.S.
responsibility for the violence that occurred. In the United States,
analysis of U.S. policy in Guatemala tends to begin and end with the coup
in 1954. Much less is known or understood about the complex, intimate
and enduring role played by successive U.S. administrations in Guatemala
throughout the course of the long civil conflict. The declassified
documents begin to tell that story. They contain a wealth of new
details about the U.S. government's operations on the ground in Guatemala
and about U.S. relations with the Guatemalan military, and they offer an
invaluable public record of overt and covert decision-making in Washington.

The Guatemala Documentation Project

The Guatemala Documentation Project began with months
of secondary research, resulting in a series of Freedom of Information
Act (FOIA) requests submitted to the U.S. government during 1994 and 1995.
We knew from previous experience that certain U.S. agencies regularly produce
detailed records on foreign military forces. Working out of the embassies,
U.S. officials gather the information through intelligence liaison, military-to-military
and diplomatic contacts. The agencies most likely to have documents
on the Guatemalan military in their archives included:

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA): The responsibility of
the DIA's defense attachés overseas to collect and analyze data
on foreign armies made this agency one of the most fruitful sources of
detailed information on the Guatemalan military. The duties of the
attachés  who routinely rotate in and out of country every few
years  include selecting students for U.S. military training programs,
monitoring promotions, identifying promising officers who might advance
to positions of power some day, and recruiting intelligence sources.
The DIA produces "military intelligence summaries," biographic sketches
on key officers, general orders (which track changes in command) and in-depth
intelligence assessments on security issues.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA): There are two broad
categories of documents produced by the agency relevant to our work:
field reports from the CIA station in Guatemala (protected from the FOIA
by special statute and therefore impossible to obtain without the president's
intervention) and "finished intelligence" written by analysts in the Directorate
of Intelligence at headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Most of the
documents we received from the Guatemala station were the result of unusual
circumstances, arising out of the scandal over CIA liaison with Guatemalan
officers linked to the murder of a U.S. citizen.

U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM): SOUTHCOM's military installations
in Panama served as the nerve center for the U.S. military presence in
Latin America during the cold war. Its analysts and intelligence
officers prepared contingency plans, assessed foreign militaries for war
fighting capabilities, and reported on narcotics trafficking, political
instability and insurgency in the region. They also produced biographies
of key military officers.

Agency for International Development (AID): AID's Public
Safety programs were key to the development of intelligence and security
forces throughout the hemisphere to deal with internal security.
The agency's Public Safety Division in Guatemala, which functioned from
1957-74, wrote hundreds of important reports on the civilian police forces.
Since military officers controlled the security apparatus, Public Safety
documents were a revealing source of information about both the police
and the army.

State Department: The U.S. embassy in Guatemala City reported
on a wide range of political, social, economic and security matters throughout
the years. It also  after the Carter administration made human rights
reporting a priority -- produced a vast quantity of cables, memoranda and
annual assessments of the human rights situation in the country.
Back in Washington, the Bureaus of Intelligence and Research and Inter-American
Affairs regularly tracked events in Guatemala.

Presidential documents: These key documents include records
from the White House and the president's National Security Council.
They reflect the highest level of policy-making in relation to Guatemala,
but they are relatively rare, produced only in times of crisis. Those
that we have are among the most important documents in the collection.

In 1995 and 1996, as we continued to file FOIA requests,
we investigated other sources of declassified U.S. documents on Guatemala
including the National Archives, presidential libraries (Eisenhower to
Reagan), private papers collections, and more. The Clinton administration
helped significantly when it released in June 1996 its Intelligence Oversight
Board (IOB) Report on U.S. intelligence operations in Guatemala, accompanied
by approximately 6,000 State Department, CIA and Defense Department documents.
The IOB investigation focused on the CIA's knowledge about the murders
of U.S. citizen Michael DeVine and the Guatemalan husband of U.S. citizen
Jennifer Harbury. At the same time, we began designing what would
eventually become the "Military Database," containing information on the
Guatemalan armed forces drawn from the thousands of pages of declassified
records we obtained in the course of the project.

The Historical Clarification Commission of Guatemala
opened its doors in August 1997. We turned over the Military Database
to CEH investigators in December, and in January 1998 gave them more than
5,000 pages of the most detailed and substantive documents we had collected
by that time. We also worked with the commission to help obtain additional
documents from the Clinton administration, answer specific questions from
historians and investigators as their work proceeded, and write analytical
papers on a variety of topics to assist in the drafting of the report.

Within Guatemala, the Clarification Commission's
mandate gave it the right to ask for information from the parties to the
peace accords (government and guerrillas), but levied no penalty for refusing
to comply. In fact the Guatemalan army gave only the most minimal
assistance, according to CEH coordinator Christian Tomuschat, and refused
to turn over most of the critical documents the CEH requested, with the
claim that they were exempt on "national security" grounds or that the
papers had been destroyed in the course of the war. Without the army's
cooperation, the commission was forced to rely almost entirely on secondary
sources for information on the military -- including human rights reporting
by non-governmental organizations and books, articles and manuscripts by
scholars of the Guatemalan military. To those sources commission
investigators added testimonies from victims of the violence, their families
and witnesses, a handful of interviews conducted with active and retired
military officers, and the few military documents actually turned over
to the commission, including some of the army's counterinsurgency campaign
plans.

Report on the Guatemalan Armed Forces

This report, a compilation of information culled
from the declassified record, is the product of the Archive's Guatemala
Project. It is made up of two volumes. Volume I consists of
data gathered on key military units and officers for the truth commission's
use. Drawing on thousands of general orders, biographic records and
intelligence reports produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency from the
1960s to the 1990s, Archive researchers extracted information about the
command structure of almost 300 military units and entered it into a database.
What we include in this volume are two views of the same data: organized
by each unit first, giving the roster of its commanders over time, and
then alphabetically by each officer's name followed by a resume of his
career.

The 79 units appearing in the report were chosen from those included
in the database by a set of simple criteria:

1. The elements of the high command
2. The elements of the operational structure (military zones, task
forces and key army brigades, for example)
3. The elements of the intelligence apparatus
4. Officer training centers (Escuela Politécnica and the U.S.
Army School of the Americas, for example)

The 232 individual officers appearing in this report were selected from
almost 2000 Guatemalan military officers on the basis of another set of
criteria:

1. All military officers who served in the high command
2. All officers who served in the task forces (key counterinsurgency
units)
3. All officers who served in intelligence units

Volume II contains five examples of the basic DIA
general orders and biographic records from which the database was constructed,
and 48 of the most richly detailed and interesting documents that we obtained
about the Guatemalan military through FOIA. This broader category
of declassified records -- embassy cable traffic, CIA intelligence reports,
AID records on police programs, defense intelligence assessments and more
-- provides an extraordinary glimpse into the institutional life and development
of the Guatemalan armed forces for the duration of the civil conflict.
Subjects covered in the documents include: the early cooperation
between the military and U.S. intelligence and counterinsurgency advisors,
the development of the Guatemalan intelligence apparatus, military operations
against the guerrillas, violence and human rights abuses, internal power
struggles and civil-military relations.

Introducing the document section is an emblematic
photograph showing two U.S. military advisors in 1968 working with Col.
Carlos Arana Osorio and his aides. We include this photograph to
make clear that our purpose here is to increase accountability not only
of the Guatemalan military but also of our own armed forces in the United
States.

Conclusion

Two key questions remain to be addressed: First,
is the information in the declassified documents reliable and credible?
Second, why does the National Security Archive choose to release the report
now?

Can we trust the documents? Yes and no.
After more than five years of reading and analyzing the declassified U.S.
record on behalf of the Archive's Guatemala Project, I am confident that
the factual information contained in the documentation concerning the Guatemalan
military's command structure, officer assignments, rank and promotions
is quite reliable. This is precisely the kind of data that the U.S.
government routinely collects and publishes about itself; it is also the
kind of material least likely to be based on subjective interpretation.
We would rate the military database and the extracted version found in
Volume I of this report, therefore, as highly credible. If the Guatemalan
army identifies errors in this presentation of the U.S. government's reporting,
I would welcome the publication of their own reference database about military
command structure and officer careers to use in the future.

In contrast, the broader historical record  made
up of the many thousands of U.S. documents released on Guatemala over the
years from the embassy, the intelligence agencies and the defense attachés
 are based on a much more subjective and interpretive process. And
they confront analysts with the same problem that every reporter, historian
and scholar always faces when using primary documents, and the even greater
problems faced by prosecutors and defendants in making documents admissible
as legal evidence. How do we evaluate for reliability material produced
by individual analysts with their own perspectives, prejudices and political
agendas? Which documents were written to influence policy, cover-up
mistakes, camouflage bad decisions, help promote a personal career, help
damage another, or promulgate an ideological position?

The answer is that the material found in them is
only truly useful when combined with information gathered by other means.
Both the "Recovery of Historical Memory" (REMHI) project of the Guatemalan
Catholic Church and the Historical Clarification Commission, for example,
did many things we could not do: they gathered oral histories from
victims or their families; they interviewed members of the armed forces;
they sought out perpetrators of human rights violations; they conducted
exhumations of clandestine grave sites -- all critical ingredients for
an informed, rich and complex picture of the violence.

Combined with other information, the declassified
record offers a unique window into the country, the era, and the institutions
involved. The documents illuminate details never before understood
or known about some of the most important human rights cases, and at the
same time help analysts of human rights, military or national security
policy gain a more complete picture of the period under study. For
U.S. citizens, they provide the internal record of policies conducted in
the name of the American people but without their knowledge. And
for the citizens of Guatemala, they provide an inside look at many of the
most complex issues at stake in contemporary Guatemalan history -- issues
that continue to be closed to public scrutiny.

The Archive decided to make our report on the Guatemalan
military public today for several reasons. The first is prosaic:
the Guatemala Documentation Project is done. The deadline for completing
our work was the day the Historical Clarification Commission released its
report to the Guatemalan people, on February 25, 1999. In an effort
to calculate the right moment for our the publication of our own report,
we chose to wait until the outgoing government of Guatemala  already burdened
by the necessity of confronting the Clarification Commission's findings
 stepped down. We submit the results of our work today to a new
administration, one that has expressed keen interest in addressing the
challenges of the past, with an eye to a democratic future.

In Guatemala today, there is a dynamic and galvanizing
national debate underway about the role of the armed forces in Guatemalan
society. This should not and need not be a threatening debate, but
it must be an informed one. Yet, how can the Guatemalan public participate
in a truly informed and enlightened way without the basic information necessary
for such a discussion? We believe that at a minimum the people of
Guatemala deserve a clear understanding of their own government  even
of the most powerful and secretive institution within it, the military
itself. That way, all sides of the debate can be empowered with the
strength of knowledge, facts and history.

This is your history. It is information obtained
from the U.S. government by North American scholars and researchers, and
it is available to the North American public. But it belongs to Guatemala
and it is time that it is finally in your hands.

Postscript: Transferring the Documents

The documents generated by the National Security
Archive's
Guatemala Project  including this report, "The Guatemalan Armed Forces:
What the U.S. Files Reveal," as well as several other selections of declassified
U.S. records on Guatemala -- are available on the World Wide Web.
For the purposes of our presentation in Guatemala, we brought bound copies
of the report, and electronic copies of the original Military Database
on disk. We also transported all of the declassified U.S. military
records used in compiling the database (three boxes), which MINUGUA and
the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman have agreed to accept. In
that way, researchers wishing to verify the data found in Volume I of the
report may consult with our original sources. The Archive is now
finishing production on a microfiche collection of some 2,000 of the documents
obtained through the Guatemala Project. It will be completed by the
end of the year and published in 2001.